Global Warming and Composition Studies: The Case for Intervention

Composition studies has failed to offer any field-wide conversation acknowledging global warming or the part that our normalized pedagogical and theoretical orientations play in propping up the status quo. To be sure, composition studies did not create the United States' (or the world's) energy, manufacturing, or economic infrastructures. The field does, however, participate and benefit from these structures, and our disciplinary goal to exist at the forefront of composing—which includes both technological and cultural practices—means that we have a level of complicity that we have yet to acknowledge meaningfully.Composition studies’ history is littered with aspirational forays into epistemologies that expand our thinking toward ecology (Coe, 1974; Cooper, 1986; Dobrin and Weisser, 2002), the environment (Herndl and Brown, 1996; Killingsworth and Palmer, 1991), and sustainability (Owens, 2001). These respective offerings did not necessarily compel different theoretical or pedagogical paths, nor were they necessarily directly responding to resource consumption, environmental degradation, or global warming. Our field needs a more robust, resource-conscious line of inquiry that theorizes the relationship between texts and resource consumption, recognizes that sustainable composition is concerned about production (of texts), understands that sustainability should be considered situationally, not as a God term, and rethinks the resource cost of composing.Shifting composition studies’ framework from its dominant epistemological orientation (specifically social-epistemology) toward an ontological line of inquiry that emphasizes writing’s material and resource choices can provide a path forward for compositionists who want to contribute to global warming amelioration side-by-side with disciplinary goals. Applying ontological lenses around the concepts of material lifecycles, coexistence, and our interconnected world can allow composition to contribute to global warming discussions without sacrificing disciplinary objectives.While a shift in composition’s research, theory, and pedagogy can reorient the field toward a more active participation in global warming conversations, important disciplinary structures and hierarchies also need scrutiny. While cultural conversations around race, gender, sexuality, economic class, and disability (among others) have been addressed by leading disciplinary organizations like the National Council of Teachers of English and the Conference on College Composition and Communication, there has been no leadership on questions of resource consumption or the environment. Applying these inquiry-based pressures simultaneously from the individual teacher/scholar up and from leadership down can improve our contribution to global warming amelioration across the board.